Charlie Brown is taking his 50 years of stories from Atlanta’s drag scene and putting them to the page with the impending release of his memoirs.
The self-proclaimed “Bitch of the South” is currently shopping the project around to prospective publishers. It will cover not only his time onstage in Atlanta, but also his childhood in rural Tennessee in the 1950s, coming out while serving in the U.S. Air Force at the height of the Vietnam War, his “baby drag” days in Nashville, his nearly-50-year relationship with his husband Fred Wise, the birth of the Charlie Brown persona and his return to the stage this year after several health issues.
“I crawled my ass out of the country and my daddy always told me, ‘Look before you leap,’” Brown told WABE. “So I became streetsmart and got into fun things, got into some messes. It’s all about me growing up as a country boy and becoming an internationally-acclaimed entertainer.”
Brown performed at the long-gone Atlanta gay bar Sweet Gum Head in the 1970s and hosted a cabaret show for 15 years at Backstreet, the iconic 24-hour dance club that closed in 2004. He opened his own club in Underground Atlanta after that. He’s performed at several other Atlanta venues in the years since, including Lips Atlanta and X Midtown.
The book project came about after longtime Atlanta journalist Richard Eldredge interviewed Brown and Wise for a Backstreet oral history in Atlanta magazine’s Pride issue in 2020. Brown also appeared in drag at the magazine’s virtual Backstreet reunion party.